House Budget Cutting Bill Passes 217–215; ANWR Out, Oil Shale In
18 November 2005
Early Friday morning, the House narrowly passed a $50-billion budget-cutting measure (H.R. 4241) 217–215. The approved version does not contain the original provisions for opening up the Artic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). It does contain language that lets mining companies buy public land again in the Rocky Mountain West and speeds up oil-shale development.
House Republican leadership had postponed voting on the bill last week, as they were unable to garner sufficient support even after the removal of the ANWR provisions.
The ANWR provisions will likely reappear during the conference work between House and Senate. The Senate two weeks agoweek passed its own budget-cutting package, which did contain the ANWR provision. (Earlier post.)
Republican Pete Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, has indicated it did not matter if the House dropped the ANWR drilling language because he would work to include the provision in budget bill negotiations during a joint Senate-House conference committee.
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Looks like a millionaire can still deduct $100,000 for buying a Hummer but poor country folk lose fire and ambulance service.
Posted by: tom deplume | 18 November 2005 at 12:51 PM
Talk about a hollow victory. Save ANWR. Sacrifice the Rocky Mountains. Somehow, I don't think that was a very good tradeoff.
Posted by: tom | 18 November 2005 at 02:59 PM
Perhaps interested parties will sue to save the rockies, hopefully it will be in court long enough to get the measure overturned.
Posted by: sensitive_man | 18 November 2005 at 04:58 PM
Defacing the mountains is bad enough (look at the Colorado
Springs foothills) but the absolute total loss of huge amounts of water is the real disaster of oil shale mining.
Posted by: Ralph Marsh | 18 November 2005 at 09:23 PM
The hummer loophole was fixed a while ago.
http://moneycentral.msn.com/content/Taxes/P97282.asp
Perhaps you guys should actually wait for objective analysis of the possible impact in the Rocky Mountains before overreacting. But then no one seemed to want this in the case of ANWR.
When exactly did environmentalism become a religion?
Posted by: troy | 19 November 2005 at 12:40 PM
Shell has appearently developed an in situ oil shale extraction process that is much better than the surface processing approach which has been the stardard approach. In situ is probably the only way they'll ever get it done the other approach is so environmentally harsh that they would get a substantial amount of resistance to a large scale implementation of it.
Posted by: Tripp | 19 November 2005 at 02:18 PM
"When exactly did environmentalism become a religion?"
Troy: apparently some time ago. Since you asked.
Hear the word of the Lord, you Israelites, because the LORD has a charge to bring against you who live in the land: "There is no faithfulness, no love, no acknowledgment of God in the land. … Because of this the land mourns, and all who live in it waste away; the beasts of the field and the birds of the air and the fish of the sea are dying. My people are destroyed from lack of knowledge" (Hos. 4:1-3,6).
There's lots more where this came from, check out the Creation Care alliance.
http://www.creationcare.org/conference/scripture.php
Posted by: Shirley E | 21 November 2005 at 07:22 AM